If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing-bell;
Some a light sigh.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849), a late-Romantic English poet and dramatist, was preoccupied with mortality, the afterlife, and the theatricality of death—concerns that also dominate his best-known work, the verse drama *Death’s Jest-Book*. The quoted stanza comes from his lyric “Dream-Pedlary,” a poem that imagines a peddler hawking dreams as if they were commodities. Written in the early 19th century and circulated posthumously with Beddoes’s poems, the piece reflects the period’s fascination with dreams as both psychological experience and poetic currency, while also bearing Beddoes’s characteristic macabre undertone (the “passing-bell” of death).

The speaker poses a whimsical but unsettling question: if dreams could be bought, which would you choose, and what would you pay? By pricing dreams in emotional and mortal “costs” (a “light sigh” versus a “passing-bell”), Beddoes suggests that inner fantasies are never free—they are purchased with feeling, time, and sometimes life itself. The marketplace conceit also satirizes human desire: we treat even the most private, intangible experiences as objects for acquisition. The stanza’s sing-song simplicity heightens the irony, as the childlike rhythm carries images of grief and death, implying that longing and imagination are inseparable from loss.